‘telling a different tale’ - mike hulme · first book high tide: ... but the rifts in the...

February 2011 To appear in special issue of Climatic Change Do not cite without author’s permission

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‘Telling a different tale’ literary, historical and meteorological readings of a Norfolk heatwave

Mike Hulme

School of Environmental Sciences

University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

[email protected]

Submitted to Climatic Change for a special issue on

‘Cultural Spaces of Climate’ edited by Georgina Endfield

Submitted 7 May 2010

Revised 7 February 2011

Abstract

Articulated initially by physical scientists, the idea of anthropogenic global climate

change has been subject to increasingly diverse examinations in recent years. The

idea has been appropriated by economists, worked with by engineers and, more

recently, scrutinised by social scientists and humanities scholars. Underlying these

examinations are different, yet rarely exposed, presumptions about what kind of

‘thing’ climate is: a physical abstraction, a statistical construct, an imaginative idea.

If the ontological status of climate is rarely made explicit it becomes difficult to know

whether the different epistemologies used to reveal climates – and their changing

properties – are appropriate. This study offers one way in which the different worlds

inhabited by the idea of climate may be revealed. It does so by examining a

heatwave: a powerful meteorological phenomenon one would think and one which

scientific accounts of climate change tell us will become more frequent in the future.

The heatwave in question occurred in July 1900 in the county of Norfolk, England.

This heatwave inhabits three very different worlds: the imaginative world of L P

Hartley in his novel The Go Between; the historical world of late Victorian Norfolk;

and the digital world of the climate sciences. The traces of the heatwave left in

these different worlds are varied and access to them is uneven. Constructing an

adequate interpretation of this singular climatic event and its meaning is challenging.

The study suggests that grasping the idea of climate may be harder than we think.

Climates may be ineffable. Yet the approach to the study of climate illustrated here

opens up new ways of thinking about the meaning and significance of climate

change.

Keywords: Heatwaves Norfolk The Go Between Climate Change Culture


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As a liberating power with its own laws [the heat] was outside my experience … In

the heat the senses, the mind, the heart, the body, all told a different tale. One felt

another person, one was another person.

[Hartley, 1953/1997; p.70]

1 Climate and Culture

Have we ever been more aware of our own climate and the climates of other

countries than we are today? While humans have always been anxious about

changes in climate (Ross, 1991; Boia, 2005), there are today heightened anxieties

about what the climatic future holds. This gathering concern is due to the

remarkable penetration into social and political discourses around the world over

the last two decades and more of the idea of (anthropogenic) climate change.

Scientific accounts of future changes in climate offered by, for example, the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are coupled with visible evidence

of the effects of climate warming on mountain glaciers, Arctic sea-ice and land and

marine biota. They suggest new justifications for the enduring human fear that

climate may not perform the way we want it to. Even if our material dependencies

on physical climate are now more varied than in previous eras - and for many in the

more industrialised nations probably also more tenuous (see Hitchings, 2010) - no-

one fully escapes the quotidian encounter with the weather (Horn, 2007). The

English, for example, continue to use talk about the weather as a surrogate for

conversation (Fox, 2005), even as the idea of climate change adds new reasons for

complaining, praising or worrying about the weather.

Yet Western societies in particular seem tolerant of different accounts of exactly

what kind of ‘thing’ climate is. Since the Enlightenment, these societies have

increasingly sought to record and quantify their weather in numerical form. Initially,

in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this was through sporadic meteorological

measurements (Jankovic, 2000; Anderson, 2005), while later it was through more

comprehensive ways of capturing, describing and simulating climates in numerical

terms (Miller, 2004). In these Western societies – and gradually through the unifying

work of the World Meteorological Organisation perhaps too in all societies - climate

has become reified through numbers. The ‘global temperature index’ (e.g. Jones &

Moberg, 2003) thus becomes the signature of a globalised climate and its

performance gets reported in the same way as way as do, for example, the FTSE-100

index and indicators of national GDP (Hulme, 2010). The scientific narrative of

climate change places high value on the quantification, simulation and visualisation

of climate through advanced computer technologies. The dominant articulation of

climate is therefore as a physical entity, a reality revealed through enumeration and

constructed through statistical and mathematical manipulation. With Western

societies in the vanguard, the world has witnessed powerful moves towards the

quantification, globalisation and virtualisation of climate (Miller, 2004; Edwards,

2010).


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What this has done is to ‘de-culture’ climate (Livingstone, 2004; Hulme, 2008;

Daniels & Endfield, 2009) or – following Latour (1993) – to ‘purify’ it. No-one

experiences global temperature, nor indeed any other numerical index of climate.

The idea of climate thus becomes removed from its imaginative, historical and

cultural anchors, whilst offered in its place is a new category of climatic ‘realities’

emerging from abstracted weather statistics or from supercomputers. The idea of

climate becomes detached from direct sensual experiences and removed from local

cultural interpretations and meanings. As Hulme (2008) puts it:

Climates do not travel well between scales: the essential loading of climate with

culture – what climate means for people and places and the relationships between

people and places over time – is completely lost through such purifying practices.

This begins to explain one of the paradoxes of the current framing of climate

change. On the one hand the physicality of weather is being increasingly

influenced by human practices on a global scale – yes, temperatures are rising. Yet

the very construction of these universalised diagnostic indicators of change strips

them of their constitutive human values and cultural meanings. [pp.7-8]

These enumerated and purified climates are both prospective and virtual. They are

‘yet-to-be climates’ embodied in, and made visual through, the electronics of

computers (Edwards, 2010; Gramelsberger & Feichter, 2011). And their digital

contours and colourful graphics make them highly portable. Such prospective,

virtual and portable climates are separated from locally situated practices of

encounter, imagination and constructed meaning, practices which have dominated

historical articulations of the idea of climate (Golinski, 2007). The construction of

climate and climate change by Earth System scientists and the IPCC – its

objectification - exerts a stranglehold on the imaginations of the academic, political

and policy elites. Yet the rest of the world remains disenfranchised from such

constructions of climate, mere spectators, and are therefore emotionally,

psychologically and culturally distanced from their resulting products (Heise, 2008).

Recognising the sterilising and distancing effect of this separation, one recent

response has been to seek new ways of connecting scientific accounts of future

climate change with place, with the visual and with the sensual. Thus Mark Lynas’

first book High Tide: News from a Warming World sought to connect scientific

depictions of climate change with travelogue descriptions of the effects of climate

change in diverse places (Lynas, 2004). The Cape Farewell project was established by

David Buckland in 2001 to allow artists, writers and educators to experience the High

Arctic and to ‘bring home stories and artworks that tell how a warming planet is

impacting on this wilderness’ (Buckland et al., 2006). And ecologist Anna Lawrence

explores how popular phenology in the UK – in her case amateur ornithology - allows

for the co-construction of accounts of climate change which pay respect to both

physical and imagined realities (Lawrence, 2009).

These initiatives offer different types of attempts to bridge the gaps opened up

between the global, virtual and portable climates of the future and the multitude of


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everyday located, sensual and imaginative encounters with weather in the present.

But the rifts in the matrix of physical and imaginative realities which together

construct the idea of climate, rifts torn open by Enlightenment rationality, run deep.

The project of repairing these tears in reality - of finding resonant cultural ways of

connecting climates past, climates present and climates future and thereby creating

new meanings of the idea of climate - is more demanding than suggested by the

examples cited above. Western intellectual elites have indeed only just started on

this project and are not sure where they are heading.

It is true that a number of voices in recent years – in part the voices of cultural

historians, historians of science and anthropologists - have sought to reveal and

deepen our understanding of the links between climate and culture. The studies and

surveys by Meyer (2000), Strauss and Orlove (2003), Boia (2005), Cruikshank (2005),

Sherratt et al. (2005), Fine (2007), Golinksi (2007), Crate and Nuttall (2008), Mergen

(2008), Hulme (2009), Behringer (2010), and Putra-Johns and Trexler (2011) have all

offered accounts of climate or climate change which in different ways challenge the

dominant scientific account of purified climates. In each case climate is shown to be

an idea which is co-constructed between physical and imagined realities; the idea of

climate only emerges from the creative interplay of these two domains of human

experience, an idea continuously in flux.

A number of other projects also give shape to this ambition, exploring the many

different ways in which the idea of climate - and hence climate change - becomes

constructed. A few are listed below.

• In The Weather Reports You (Horn, 2007), artist Roni Horn allows Icelandic

citizens to talk about their experience of weather and climate, what it means

to them, how it reflects or creates their moods, or embodies their hopes and

fears for the future.

• Historian Tim Sherratt in his work on Australian climate and culture (Sharratt,

2005) has explored the psychological work that the idea of a ‘national

climate’ can do for a nation, climate thereby becoming both a personal

narrative and a political resource.

• Trevor Harley (2003) has shown the work that is undertaken for British

citizens by extreme weather events in providing a framework for the

structuring and accessing of personal and collective memory. Weather and

climate offer resources for idealising and romanticising the past, registers in

which meteorological ‘truth’ may be of quite minor importance.

• In her book The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911, Juliet

Nicholson (2006) offers a fusion of the climate and culture of Britain in the

summer of 1911 using the heat, light and sun of a glorious summer to evoke

the pathos and tragedy of a pre-World War I era. Here is the intermingling of

climate, history and nostalgia.


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2 ‘Telling a Different Tale’ – the study

The study described here contributes to this gathering project of reconnecting

physical climates – whether real or virtual – with their historical, cultural and

imaginative contexts. I wish to experiment with the idea of climate by exploring the

different ways in which a specific climate event1

‘lives on’ and becomes a resource

that is used in different cultural pursuits, social realities and scientific enterprises. In

so–doing, a more nuanced and contingent view of climate is offered than the

dominant ‘one-dimensional’ account which saturates contemporary public

discussions about climate change. If the very idea of climate contains within it

different, contested and constructed meanings, then the claim that climates can be

adequately simulated inside computers, mobilised through numbers and managed

by international protocols must be seriously challenged.

In his recent book The Three Cultures, Jerome Kagan describes the assumptions,

vocabularies and contributions of the sciences, the social sciences and the

humanities to human knowledge (Kagan, 2009). He argues that the meanings of

many of the concepts used by each culture are unique to it and do not apply to the

others because the source of evidence for each term is special. By analogy, I argue

that all three cultures are needed to give depth and adequacy to the idea of climate.

We have seen above how through quantification and statistical normalisation,

climates become enumerated, universalised and predictable. The natural sciences

might therefore seek to understand a heatwave through the lens of meteorology.

Yet climates can also be localised, historicised and encultured and so the social

sciences might seek to understand a heatwave through the lenses of geography and

history. And climates can also be romanticised and memorised. The arts and

humanities might therefore seek to understand a heatwave through the imagination.

These three cultures of knowledge are used in this study to explore the idea of

climate, in particular to examine one historical climatic episode – a heatwave. In so

doing, I assert that the idea of climate has multiple realities. Different

epistemologies and methodologies are needed to approach these different

ontological states of climate. The choice of epistemology determines to a great

extent what can be revealed and what remains hidden about climate.

The heatwave studied here occurred across England in July 1900. The study focuses

on the county of Norfolk where the heatwave endured for 18 days, from Tuesday 10

July through Friday 27 July. Although this heatwave existed physically over a

hundred years ago and cannot now be directly experienced, it can nevertheless

today be encountered in at least three different ways. The heatwave of July 1900

lives on, so to speak, in three different worlds, each world endowing this climatic

episode with quite different meanings.

1 In the study presented here this event is a heatwave, but I suggest that many other climatic phenomena are

also open to the multiple lines of enquiry pursued here.


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We first encounter the Norfolk heatwave of July 1900 in the fictional world of Leo

Colston, Marian Maudsley and Ted Burgess, characters in L P Hartley’s 1953 novel

The Go-Between. Readers of this text experience the heatwave vicariously through a

cross-fertilisation of the imaginations of Hartley and his fictional character Leo

Colston with their own imaginative worlds and their reading of other texts. We next

encounter the heatwave through historical traces located in the pages of the local

and regional newspapers of Norfolk for the month of July 1900 and in other

documentary evidence. We discover how the consequences of the heatwave

reverberated through the lives of certain individuals. And we encounter the July

1900 heatwave through the meteorological records of the UK Met Office and their

climatological derivatives. Here the heatwave is reified and purified through

enumeration and digitisation.

These different encounters with the heatwave are possible only by assuming

different ontologies with regard to the idea of climate and by deploying different

procedures of enquiry. In the respective sections that follow, the methodologies of

literary analysis, historical research and scientific analysis are therefore used to make

sense of these different realities2

.

3 The Literary Heatwave

Leslie Poles Hartley was born in Cambridgeshire in 1895 and published his first book,

a collection of short stories, in 1924. He is best known for his 1953 novel The Go-

Between which won the 1954 Heinemann Foundation Prize of the Royal Society of

Literature and which was later made into an internationally successful film3

The story begins in 1953 with the reminiscences of Leo Colston, an elderly man,

looking back on his childhood with

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nostalgia and regret, although the story is

recounted through the naive eyes of Leo the boy. In the summer of 1900, Leo aged

13 visited his school friend Marcus Maudsley whose family lived in the luxurious

country manor of Brandham Hall, Norfolk. As with other English novels, Hartley’s

country manor offers an ‘atmosphere of a self-contained, traditional world of rigid

class divisions’ (Ingersoll, 2004: 245). Leo is from a comparatively humble

background and despite his hosts doing their best to make him feel welcome he

remains an outsider. His discomfort is symbolised by wearing in the oppressive heat

the thick winter clothing his mother packed for him.

When Marcus falls ill, and with the July heatwave intensifying, Leo becomes a secret

‘go-between’ for Marian Maudsley, the daughter of the aristocratic family, and

nearby tenant farmer Ted Burgess. Leo is happy to help Marian because she is kind

to him and he develops an infatuation for her as she represents the Virgin of the

Zodiac. Leo’s innocence makes it easier for the lovers to manipulate him. Ted

2 This raises some interesting questions about the nature of disciplinary enquiry and whether the study

described here is multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary (see Robinson 2008). 3 The film, released in 1970, won the Grand Prix at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. The screenplay was by Harold

Pinter and the film starred Julie Christie and Alan Bates in the leading roles. Semyard (1980) offers a detailed

analysis of Pinter’s treatment of the novel.


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comes from a lower social class than Marian and there can be no possible future in

the relationship. Although Marian and Ted are fully aware of this, Leo is too naive to

understand why the lovers can never marry. The situation is further complicated by

Marian’s impending engagement to Viscount Hugh Trimingham, a wealthy and

influential member of the local nobility.

Together, these factors make Marian's secret relationship with Ted highly dangerous

for all parties concerned. Leo starts acting as an interceptor, and occasional editor,

of the messages. Eventually, he begins to comprehend the sexual nature of the

relationship between Marian and Ted and feels increasingly uncomfortable about his

role as go-between. Leo's involvement as messenger between the lovers eventually

has disastrous consequences. As the heatwave finally breaks in a dramatic

thunderstorm, Mrs Maudsley discovers the couple in flagrante delicto with Leo as a

reluctant witness. This leads directly to Ted shooting himself, while Leo is left

profoundly affected with permanent psychological scars. We see Leo, 50 years later,

an emotionally detached adult who has never been able to establish intimate

relationships, ‘appalled by his premature glimpse into the adult world and haunted

by guilt’ (Willmott, 1975: 5). When Leo looks back on the events through the eyes of

a mature adult, he is fully aware of how the incident has left its mark on him.

Hartley later revealed that the novel was to some extent autobiographical (Brookes-

Davies, 1997), ‘an anagram of his own experience’. It is set in Norfolk in July 1900

and a number of the fictional places are barely disguised variants from Hartley’s own

life. Thus the real-life Brandenham Hall east of Swaffham, where Hartley himself

stayed in August 1909 aged 14, becomes the fictional Brandham Hall where Leo

stayed and, for example, Beeston village in Norfolk becomes Beeston Castle in the

novel.

Of central importance – and the object of our interest – is the heatwave against

which the story unfolds and from which it draws much of its mood and symbolism.

The day after Leo arrives at Brandham Hall – Tuesday 10 July - the weather turns

from being cool and temperate to offering a cloudless sky with the sun beating down

[p.354

]. One of the first things Leo and Marcus do together is to read the

thermometer located outside the garden shed which stands at ‘nearly eighty-three’

(28.3⁰C). This reading of the thermometer becomes a daily ritual for Leo and we can

trace the meteorological conditions of this golden July throughout his stay at

Brandham. The temperature peaks at 94⁰F (34.4⁰C) on Monday 16 July, with Leo

willing it to reach 100 [p.87], before the thunderstorms of Friday 27 July bring the

heatwave – and Leo’s recounting of his story – to an end.

The mimetic accuracy of Hartley’s heatwave is particularly noteworthy. The

‘fictional’ recorded daytime temperatures at Brandham Hall are summarised in Table

1, alongside the actual temperatures recorded for these same calendrical days at

nearby Hillingdon. The parallel is striking. Higdon (1977) has pointed out the rarity

of such an accurate time scheme in British fiction and that it reveals ‘Hartley’s

4 All page numbers refer to the 1997 penguin edition of The Go-Between, with an introduction and notes by

Douglas Brookes-Davis.


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concern for precise detail’ [p.48]. But what has not been noted before is that this

mimetic accuracy extends to the specific meteorology of the heatwave itself, down

to the very thunderstorm which brought it to an end.

This seems a crucial observation. For Hartley, the heatwave is central to his story

and is used to symbolise nostalgia, myth, dream and passion. And the oppressive

heat of the physical atmosphere parallels the oppressive social atmosphere of

Brandham Hall. The heatwave is burned into Leo’s memory so that the older,

narrating, Leo can still evoke it 50 years later when he is well into his sixties. As

Brookes-Davis recounts, Leo’s buried memory is ‘shot through with summer sun and

shimmering in a heat-haze’ [p.xx], symbolism for the ‘golden age’ of the Edwardian

decade and also of Leo’s own lost innocence. It was this deployment of heat as a

symbol of nostalgia that Juliet Nicholson used in her creative account of British

society in the summer of 1911: ‘I wanted to evoke the full vivid richness of how it

smelt, looked, sounded, tasted and felt to be alive in England during the months of

such a [hot] summer’ (Nicholson, 2006: 1). Governing Nicholson’s account, in a

similar way to Hartley’s fictional masterpiece, was ‘the almost unbroken, constant,

sometimes wonderful and sometimes debilitating heat of the summer itself’ [p.3].

But even more powerful than the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’, the heatwave

functions metaphorically as an indicator of Leo’s slowly awakening sexuality. As the

thermometer rises, so new emotions and passions are released within Leo:

From being my enemy the summer had become my friend ... I felt I had been given

the freedom of the heat, and I roamed about in it as if I was exploring a new

element ... I yearned to travel far, ever farther into it, and achieve a close

approximation with it; for I felt that my experience of it would somehow be

cumulative, and that if it would only get hotter and hotter there was a heart of

heat I should attain to. [pp.45-6]

As a liberating power with its own laws [the heat] was outside my experience. In

the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature … In the heat the senses,

the mind, the heart, the body, all told a different tale. One felt another person,

one was another person. [p.70]

Hartley used the climax of the heatwave – its dramatic ending in a thunderstorm and

torrential rain – to presage the denouement of the story: the revelation of Ted and

Marian’s affair and Leo’s role in facilitating it. When Leo awoke on the final, fateful,

day at Brandham Hall the weather had turned. The footman, Henry, helps make

clear the bewilderment that Leo now felt and his sense of impending tragedy:

‘It’s not raining yet ... but it will be before the day’s out, mark my words ... All this

hot weather isn’t natural.’

‘Oh, but it’s summer!’ I exclaimed.


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‘Summer or not, it isn’t natural,’ Henry repeated. ‘Why, everything’s burnt up and

they do say’ – here he looked down at me ominously – ‘that quite a lot of people

have gone mad.’

‘Oh,’ I exclaimed, for mental derangement, like most forms of calamity, had a

special interest for me. [p.225]

Later that morning Leo observed,

And now the skies were grey: that was one reason why I felt strange. We had had

cloudy days before, but not dull days, threatening rain. It told me summer was

over and a sterner season lay ahead. [p.227]

By late afternoon, the clouds,

... had an ominous look, white upon grey, grey upon black, and the still air

presaged thunder. One after another we went outside, stared at the sky, and

came back with our verdicts. [p.235]

For Leo – both the young Leo and later the old reflective Leo – this sterner season

was the rest of his life, lived out perpetually under the shadow of this darkening sky,

the searing heatwave long banished to the mythical ‘golden age’ of his innocent

youth and the surging optimism of a new century. Fifty years later Leo looks back

with regret at what might have been:

... the life of facts proved no bad substitute for the facts of life ... for when the First

War came my skill in marshalling facts was held to be more important than any

service I was likely to perform on the field. So I missed that experience, along with

many others, spooning [sexual intercourse] among them. Ted hadn’t told me

what it was, but he had shown me, he had paid with his life for showing me, and

after that I never felt like it. [p.247]

4 The Norfolk Heatwave5

The heatwave of July 1900 had consequences not only for L P Hartley and the

fictional Leo Colston, but for many aspects of late-Victorian Norfolk life and society.

These consequences are clearly evident in the daily and weekly newspapers and

magazines published during this month.

For a largely agricultural county such as Norfolk, the weather was always carefully

scrutinised by town and village alike. Thus The Daily Chronicle’s ‘Agricultural Report’

for 20 July observed: ‘The cold dry spring is being succeeded by a short spell of

tropical summer. How long the wave of heat will last no one knows’. After showery

5 The newspapers scrutinised for this section were The Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette (Norwich), The

Eastern Daily Press (Norwich), The Daily Chronicle (Norwich), The Norwich Mercury (Norwich), The Times

(London) and Punch magazine (London).


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weather in June the heat was initially welcomed, allowing ‘meadow and pasture hay

to be stocked in prime order’. These 18 days of summer heat left their mark on

Norfolk life in many ways. Cricket matches were played under cloudless skies, just as

was the match played in by Leo Colston in The Go-Between and after which his

adolescent infatuation with Marian reached its height. Commercial opportunities

offered by the heatwave too were grasped. Shops in Norwich advertised in the

newspapers ‘clothes for hot weather ... bargains in muslin robes and lace mantles’

and De Carle’s lemonade enticingly offered to ‘quench your arid thirst at 4½d a

packet which makes 2 gallons’. Entrepreneurship worked in other areas too. A

Norwich member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wrote to

The Eastern Daily Press on Thursday 26 July drawing attention to some of his

inventions for ‘offering comfort and relief to horses during this excessively hot

weather.’

The heat also interacted with the round of summer social events. The summer

garden party of the Norwich branch of the Amalgamated Society of Railway

Servants, organised on behalf of the Society’s orphans’ fund, was held on 19 July:

‘The extreme heat of the weather in the early afternoon prevented a large

attendance, but in the evening there was a grand muster.’ A week earlier The

Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette had also reported on the Queen’s Garden

Party held at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday 11 July. The 81-yr old Victoria, in

black silk costume, enjoyed what The Times reported the following day as ‘perfect

weather ... the heat was undeniably great, but its strength was pleasantly tempered

by a light breeze just sufficient to ruffle the surface of the water.’

Summer Heat

Is it death or is it life the word the flowers are saying

One to another as their silken leaves they strew?

Chalk-white butterflies are weary of their playing,

Roses have grown listless on their sun-scorched tree.

Peaches on the orchard wall match them in their glowing

White syringa strews the grass in a storm of snowing.

Half the world is weary of the summer at its height,

Weary of the sunny roads and panting for the night.

Columbines are heavy with a load of yellow honey,

Lavender is lovely for all her faded blue,

Haunted by the bees all day. The roads are over sunny,

Now for lingering footsteps and lingering words of lovers.

And as we sighed for sunshine so sigh we for the sea.

We are sick of summer, for the rose her heat discovers –

And, ah! We loved her better half-blown upon the tree.

The world is scorched with sunshine, Summer, let us be!

Figure 1: The poem ‘Summer Heat’ by amateur poet Nora Hopper published in The

Norwich Mercury on Saturday 28 July 1900.


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The heat of July 1900 inspired amateur Norfolk poets to send their offerings to the

newspapers. For example, a poem ‘Summer Heat’ by Nora Hopper was published in

The Norwich Mercury on 28 July (Figure 1), the day after the heatwave broke. And

the heat was also the subject of cartoonists in the weekly magazine Punch, notably

one cartoon from Wednesday 25 July (Figure 2) that was noticed by Leo in The Go-

Between, emphasising again the mimetic accuracy of Hartley’s fiction (Higdon, 1977:

48):

To my delight, the paper [Punch] was full of references to the heat: they made my

single experience seem a universal one. Here was the sun, ‘The Real Scorcher’ ...

bending low over the handlebars, curly rays coming out of his head , a sultry smile

on his face; and in the background Mr Punch under an umbrella, mopping his

brow, while Dog Toby, with his tongue handing out, wilted behind him. [pp.195-6]

Figure 2: ‘The Real Scorcher’. Cartoon in the weekly magazine Punch (25 July 1900,

p.69) which is alluded to by Leo in The Go-Between (and which was therefore viewed

and used by L P Hartley when writing the novel).

But there were darker sides to the effects the heatwave had on Norfolk society. A

13-yr old boy died while swimming in a river – a pursuit also partaken by the same

aged Leo Colston in The Go-Between – while 20-yr old Private W Ward from the

Norfolk Artillery Militia died of heatstroke on Wednesday 18 July. Death was

attributed to ‘congestion of the brain and lungs, caused by excessive heat, or so

called sunstroke’. And the harvesting activities in which Ted Burgess was engaged in

the The Go-Between also became hazardous in the extreme heat. On Saturday 14

July, labourer John Wright fell off a haystack at Brandon Parrs, near Barnham Broom

in Norfolk, an accidental death being recorded.

And it is the death of another agricultural labourer, George Bishop aged 52 from the

Norfolk village of Hickling, that drives home the enduring consequences of the

heatwave in the lives of ordinary people. Being overcome by heat Bishop also fell off


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a hay-wagon, the incident being recorded in The Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich

Gazette the following Saturday:

Fatal Fall at Hickling

On Wednesday [18 July] afternoon, while George Bishop (52), a farm labourer,

was employed in loading hay on a farm at Hickling, he was overcome by heat, and

fell from the wagon to the ground, and dislocated his neck. An inquest was held

on the body by the County Coroner (Mr H.R.Culley) on Thursday, and a verdict of

accidental death was returned.

Bishop’s death certificate6

records the death as being ‘accidental from injuries

caused through deceased having fallen off a load of hay’. Out of a Norfolk

population of 460,000 recorded in the 1901 census there were over 50,000

agricultural workers and as with most occupations at the time accidental deaths

were by no means uncommon. But here in the case of Bishop the heatwave of July

1900 leaves a particular, and tragic, legacy.

George Bishop was born in 1848 in the village of Hickling in northeast Norfolk, his

father also an agricultural labourer. He married Hannah Eliza Flatt, an agricultural

labourer’s daughter from nearby Ludham, in February 1873 in Hickling Parish

Church. George and Hannah had four surviving children – Ernest, Miriam, Frank and

Rachel – who in July 1900 on their father’s death were aged 25, 20, 14 and 7.

George’s death placed a premature burden on his eldest son, Ernest, also a farm

labourer. The following April, at the time of the 1901 census, Ernest was providing

for his widowed mother and his youngest sister Rachel. He had recently married

Esther Nicholls and they had a 9-month old daughter Winifred, born just days after

George’s fatal accident. Ernest was later to father two more children.

George’s accidental death in the July 1900 heatwave left its mark on his surviving

family, especially his eldest son Ernest. Ernest had to shoulder the role of primary

wage-earner not only for his own young family, but also for his widowed mother and

youngest sister. George’s children were left without their father and his

grandchildren were never to know their grandfather. For the Bishop family of

Hickling, the heat of this Wednesday in July 1900 would forever be associated with

tragedy and death, a sadness seared into the memory of those family members for

the rest of their lives.

5 The Meteorological Heatwave

The July heatwave of 1900 also left its traces in daily (and hourly) thermometer

readings from across Norfolk and further afield. These meteorological

measurements exist in daily newspapers, monthly gazettes, hand-written and

transcribed Met Office manuscripts and, now, in digital archives some of which are

6 General Register Office, Registration District Smallburgh, Sub-district Ludham, 1900, Quarter 3, vol.4b, p.31


13

available on the internet. The heatwave can thus be discovered through exercises in

data mining, synthesis and comparison. Such exercises construct a different identity

for the July 1900 heatwave to that revealed to us by L P Hartley or by accounts of

quotidian Norfolk life.

Based on data from the Central England Temperature (CET) series (Parker et al.,

1991), the July 1900 heatwave across England lasted 20 days from Tuesday 10 July to

Sunday 29 July (Table 1). On each of these days the daily-mean temperature was at

least a full degree above the 1961-1990 July average of 16⁰C. This compares closely

with the heatwave experienced by Leo Colston in The Go-Between which lasted 18

days from the day after his arrival at Brandham Hall – Tuesday 10 July – to the day

before his departure – Friday 27 July. In historical meteorological terms this

heatwave was substantial. For comparison, during a recent 18-day spell of hot

weather in England - from 22 June to 9 July 2009 – the CET averaged 17.5⁰C. The July 1900 heatwave was more than two degrees warmer than this, averaging 19.6⁰C between 10 and 27 July.

The summer of 1900 as a whole was not exceptionally warm in England. The three-

month period from June to August 1900 (15.8⁰C) ranks only 89th

warmest in the 350-

year CET series, although the single month of July 1900 (17.7⁰C) ranks in the top 10

per cent of warm Julys. July 1900 was also dry across England and Wales, but not

especially so. It was only the 44th

driest July out of the 135 Julys in the England and

Wales Precipitation series (Gregory et al., 1991) dating back to 1873.

The Central England Temperature series has been synthesised from tens of

thousands of thermometer measurements across England and is a good proxy for

temperatures over most of the country (Jones & Hulme, 1997). But the heatwave of

July 1900 is also more directly revealed in local meteorological measurements made

in the county of Norfolk. These are shown for the village of Hillington in West

Norfolk - not far from the fictional Brandham Hall - in Table 1, the data being

extracted from The Norfolk Chronicle of July 1900. The highest daytime maximum

temperature was reached in Hillington on Wednesday 25 July (91.3⁰F, 32.9⁰C) and

fourteen hours of sunshine were also recorded this day. This was the same day that

Leo wrote to his mother that a thermometer record for Brandham Hall had been set

[p.196]7

.

For L P Hartley and Leo Colston the heatwave was brought to a close by a dramatic

thunderstorm on the late afternoon of Friday 27 July. This storm is also evident in

the meteorological traces of the Norfolk heatwave. By 27 July an anticyclone was

sitting over central Europe, drawing warm and very humid air off the continent (ASE

flow – anticyclonic southeasterly – according the Lamb airflow classification; Table

1), ideal conditions for summer thunderstorms. An earlier electrical storm on

Monday 16 July had delivered nearly 30mm of rain at Hillington and the storm of 27

July was also reported in the Norfolk newspapers: ‘The most severe thunderstorm

which has visited this city and county for a large number of years occurred at

7 The warmest day (i.e., Tmean) in the CET series occurred on Friday 20 July (Table 1).


14

midnight on Friday and raged with great violence for over an hour.’ [The Norfolk

Chronicle and Norwich Gazette, Saturday 28 July].

Date

July

1900

Leo’s events Brandham

Hall

(⁰C)

Hillington

Tmx Sun Wind Rain

(⁰C) (Hrs) (dir) (ins)

Central

England

Temperature

(⁰C)

Lamb

Weather

Type

Mon 9 Arrives at

Brandham Hall

‘cool’ n/a 11.7-15.4-19.1 AW

Tue 10 29.3 n/a 10.6-18.3-26.0 ASW

Wed 11 >29.4 n/a 12.8-20.9-29.0 S

Thu 12 <25.0 25.8 14 SE 14.4-20.5-26.6 C

Fri 13 Trip to Norwich

with Marian

>28.3 28.6 10 SE 13.5-18.8-24.0 SW

Sat 14 Swimming with

Ted

<24.4 24.4 8 SE/SW 14.4-17.3-20.2 CW

Sun 15 To church with

Lord Trimmingham

28.9 25.8 11 SE/SW 10.5-17.1-23.7 AS

Mon 16 Family picnic 34.4 29.4 5 SW 1.16 14.0-20.0-26.0 CW

Tue 17 Three notes passed

between Ted and

Marian

28.3 25.7 13 SW 12.3-17.9-23.5 AW

Wed 18 29.4 29.0 13 SW 11.7-18.7-25.7 A

Thu 19 Out for lunch with

the children

33.3 32.4 13 SW/SE 11.5-20.3-29.1 A

Fri 20 33.3 27.8 9 E 16.3-22.0-27.6 E

Sat 21 Cricket match 25.6 24.6 4 SW 15.8-18.8-21.8 -

Sun 22 27.2 25.6 5 NW 15.5-19.0-22.5 AW

Mon 23 Letter to Leo’s

mother

28.3 27.2 7 NW 17.5-21.3-25.1 AW

Tue 24 31.2 30.7 12 SW 15.9-21.6-27.3 AW

Wed 25 Letter from Leo’s

mother

‘a record

temperature

32.9 14 SW 15.4-21.5-27.6 CW

Thu 26 Night trip to the

shed

27.2 n/a 15.2-19.2-23.2 ANW

Fri 27 Birthday; the affair

is ‘discovered’

Rain n/a 12.5-18.8-25.1 ASE

Sat 28 n/a 14.6-18.6-22.6 C

Sun 29 n/a 13.7-17.4-21.1 C

Mon 30 n/a 13.1-16.7-20.3 n/a

Table 1: Daily meteorological readings for the heatwave - Monday 9 to Monday 30

July 2010 – juxtaposed against the key events in The Go-Between. Sources:

‘Brandham Hall’ data are the maximum daytime temperature recorded by Leo in the

novel, converted to Celsius; Hillington data are daily maxima extracted from The

Norfolk Chronicle converted to Celsius (n/a = not available); Central England

Temperature data are, respectively, Tmin-Tmean-Tmax (see

http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/data/download.html); Lamb Weather Types

are from Lamb Weather Catalogue (Lamb, 1972) and summarise the prevailing mid-

troposphere daily airflow: ‘A’ = anticyclonic, ‘C’ = cyclonic, and ‘N’, ‘S’, ‘E’ and ‘W’

refer to the points of the compass.


15

By August 1900, Leo’s heatwave had well and truly ended, both by the cool and wet

weather of August and by the tragedy of events at Brandham Hall. By Monday 30

July, the heatwave in the CET series had dissipated and for most of August 1900 the

weather continued cool and wet. Across England, for example, August 1900 was

nearly a degree cooler than the 1961-1990 average, ranking only 240th

warmest out

of 350 Augusts in the CET series.

Although the meteorological heatwave of July 1900 was not excessive in historical

terms, it nevertheless continues to reside – and will do so permanently and

unaltered - in the meteorological statistics which contribute to our description of

English climate and climate change (for example see Figure 3). The heatwave has

been reified through numbers which can be read off original manuscripts or shared

electronically around the world.

Figure 3: The occurrence of “heatwaves” (red) and “coldwaves” (blue), from 1878 to

2001, as measured by a sequence of at least five consecutive days when the

Central England maximum temperature exceeded 22°C (heatwave), or when the

minimum temperature dropped below 0°C (coldwave). The area of each circle is

proportional to the length of the sequence. The heatwave of July 1900 is marked with

the arrow. [Source: Hulme et al., 2002].

And drawing upon the scientific account of anthropogenic climate change,

heatwaves have become signature meteorological events in popular representations

of future climate change in the UK (and elsewhere). For example, when the most

recent Government sponsored climate scenarios for the UK – labelled UKCP09

(Jenkins et al., 2009) - were published on 18 June 2009, ‘heat’ and ‘heatwaves’ was

the most common device used in the national print media to communicate the

scenarios to a wider public. Thus the headlines in some of these newspapers ran:

“Britain 2080 ... and the weather forecast is HOT” (The Sun), “UK 2080: age of the

killer heatwave” (Daily Mail), and “Boiling Britain: heatwave will be the norm in 30

years” (The Daily Mirror) (Figure 4). The purified meteorological numbers, expressed


16

in degree of heat yet detached from any cultural context as to what the Britain of

2080 might actually be like or feel like to live in, were mobilised to conjure

descriptive adjectives such as ‘killer’, ‘boiling’ and ‘baking’ to lend emotional power

to the scenarios.

Figure 4: Headline from The Daily Mirror, 19 June 2009, reporting the previous day’s

publication by the UK Government of the new UKCP09 climate scenarios for Britain

out to the year 2080.

6 Three Heatwaves ... or One?

These three encounters with the heatwave of July 1900 offer very different accounts

of the climatic events which occurred during that month in England’s fourth largest

county. They suggest at least three different realities (ontologies) which the idea of

climate can inhabit: the imagination; physical time and place; and meteorological

measurements and statistics.

In the imagination of L P Hartley – incarnated in the fictional life of Leo Colston – the

heatwave released powerful patriotic, mystical and sexual passions. The heatwave

acted for Hartley as the iconic climatic event around which his own childhood

memories were captured and transformed, much in the way that Harley (2003)

describes in his study of weather and memory amongst the British public. In The Go-

Between Hartley allows the physicality of the heatwave to interact with the

symbolism of heat and its evocation of transcendence, sexual awakening, ecstasy


17

and fear. This is revealed in the way Leo’s infatuation with the thermometer

readings reflects subliminally his state of emotional intensity. The physicality of this

climatic episode thus becomes the symbol of the boy’s passions; the symbolism of

the intense heat defines for Hartley the meaning of the heatwave. This is not an

unfamiliar imaginative deployment of the idea of heat in fiction. Camus’ The

Stranger (1942) and McEwan’s Atonement (2001) are just two examples of many

which in which the sensation of heat is used to destabilise and release sensual

passion and emotion. Ingersoll (2004:249) has pointed out in his wider study of

intertextuality in The Go-Between and Atonement how ‘the unseasonable heat

undoubtedly serves as a justification for the explosion of Eros’.

Our encounter with the heatwave through the documentary accounts of Norfolk life

and society in July 1900, and in particular of the death of George Bishop, shows

climate acting in a different way. Here we see climate as both a passive substrate

and an active agent in the shaping of the intimate and trivial details of human life,

but also of the destiny of individual narratives and life stories. The physicality of the

heatwave – exactly how hot did it get in Norfolk? - is of lesser importance than

understanding the almost infinite varieties of personal and cultural meanings

attached to its occurrence. It offered inter alia commercial opportunity for product

placement, serenity (and suffering) for the guests of a garden party, a subject for

artistic contemplation and creativity, redemption for the hay harvest, and death and

finality for an agricultural labourer, an army private and a boy swimmer. The

physicality of climate cannot be detached from its context. The climatic event is

immersed in the social and cultural life of a community; and the social and cultural

life of a community becomes entangled with the physicality of the heatwave. To

separate them is to lose all orientation and significance. ‘Climate does not simply

shape history, for it can only be known through history’ (Sherratt, 2005; 4).

As an object of scientific enquiry we find the events of July 1900 are to be read in a

different way. Of prime importance here are the measurements of heat (and rain,

wind and sun) and the veracity and representativeness of these measurements. The

meteorological readings at Hillington – reproduced at the time in the local

newspaper – thus require scrutiny if the true scientific significance of the heatwave

is to be constructed. Were the observations made at the right time of day? Had the

thermometer been serviced, was it placed in a screen and was the observer trained

in the art of reading? The meteorological meaning of the heatwave – and its

endurance for scientific posterity – depends critically on adequate answers to these

questions. But none of these considerations mattered for Leo Colston as he became

enthralled with the prospect that the thermometer at Brandham Hall might break all

records (and thereby in some way justify his emancipated actions).

In the objectified, detached world of scientific enquiry what matters is the

enumeration of the climatic event, its capture by numbers, its ‘purification’(Latour,

1993). For meteorologists the real Hillington might as well have been the fictional

Brandham, or indeed, the real Darlington or Birmingham. They only ask questions

such as: ‘Was the heatwave of July 1900 more extreme than the English heatwave of

June-July 2009?’ or ‘Was the heatwave of August 2003 more extreme in England or


18

in France?’ Whether they occur in 1900 or 2080, in France or Russia, in L P Hartley’s

imagination or Norfolk’s history, heatwaves become standardised through numbers,

and thus universalised. Knowledge about climate is made impersonal and objective,

opening a way for prediction and regulation (Porter 1995).

More importantly, the study suggests how the boundaries between these three

realities – the fictional, the historical and the meteorological - are porous and almost

impossible to fix. There is here not a trinity of heatwaves, each inhabiting a distinct

reality. There are not three separate climatic events each of which can only be

revealed using different epistemologies and methods. The July 1900 heatwave exists

simultaneously – and powerfully, tangibly - in fiction, in history and in meteorology,

with each narrative embedded in the other two. The heatwave imagined by the

reader of The Go-Between and experienced by Leo is the heatwave revealed by the

Hillington measurements. George Bishop’s death falling from the haystack was

caused by the same heatwave that led to Ted Burgess’s suicide. The physical heat

recorded at Hillington that month did provoke Nora Hopper’s poem ‘Summer Heat’

which was subsequently published in The Norwich Mercury. The July 1900 heatwave

in Norfolk can only be understood in a context which is at one and the same time

imaginative, geographical, historical and physical. And because these realities

depend upon each other, there will never again be a heatwave like it. It cannot be

re-created. It is unique.

The Meaning of a Heatwave

Meteorologists and climate modellers report that heatwaves such as the exceptional

European weather of August 2003 will become commonplace by 2050 or earlier

(Stott et al., 2004; Jenkins et al., 2009). If this is so then how much more

commonplace will become the ‘unexceptional’ heatwave of July 1900. But it will be

neither the heatwave of July 1900 nor of August 2003 that occurs in the future. The

sterilised numbers of the meteorologists cannot tell us about the George Bishops of

the future who in July 2050 will be killed by this climatic extreme, nor what kind of

‘garden parties’ will in the future bask in the heat and sunshine of ‘perfect weather’.

Nor can these numbers tell us about adolescent boys like Leo Colston for whom the

intense heat symbolised a teenage rite of passage, but the psychological effects of

which seared themselves into his memory for the rest of his life. It is not possible for

numerical descriptions of climate to tell us these things nor for models to predict the

multiple meanings of a heatwave.

Eric Klinenberg (2002) reached similar conclusions in his sociological account of the

July 1995 Chicago heatwave. Focusing on the meteorology of the event – ‘How hot

did it get, and for how long?’, ‘Was it hotter than previous heatwaves?’, ‘Was it

predicted?’ – obscured the most important characteristics of this climatic event. For

Klinenberg these characteristics are the politics of social exclusion, the conflicts

within the emergency services and the practices of media reporting. The very

particular ethnic, cultural, architectural and political characteristics of Chicago are

what give the July 1995 heatwave its shape, significance and meaning. These cannot


19

be discerned through a reading of the thermometers. The meaning of a climate

extreme is inextricable from the culture which it encounters, an argument also

illustrated in Janet McCalman’s study of nineteenth century Melbourne heatwaves

(McCalman, 2005).

With climate understood thus – as a continuously re-invented idea in which

imagination, place, culture and history engage with the physicality of heat, cold,

wind, sun and rain - the meaning of climate change remains ineffable, incapable of

being predicted through numbers or reduced to words. It was this ineffability that

The Times leader writer confronted when seeking to articulate the remarkable heat

of Juliet Nicholson’s ‘perfect summer’ of 1911:

We are used to talking about summer heat in our poetry, but it is only when a real

spell of it comes to us that we discover how rare it is. This July the whole

countryside looks at the same time both strange and familiar. There is the corn,

ripe as if it were the middle of August, and the dark foliage of later summer, but

all our Northern landscape, unchanged in its forms and objects, is transfigured by

the colours of the South. Usually, even in fine summer weather, there is a

Northern coolness in our mornings and evenings; but now one is startled even in

the early morning by the Southern splendour both of earth and sky. [The Times,

26 July 1911].

We cannot capture, even less predict, these meanings of climate - sometimes

enduring, often fleeting, always personal. We can only create them and re-create

them by telling our tales, our different tales ... and through living them. In his

exploration of the human elements of Australian climate, Tim Sherratt describes this

elusiveness of climate thus: ‘A new climate cannot be mapped and comprehended

like a new continent. It can only be known through time, through averages and

extremes, through experience and expectation’ (Sherratt, 2005: 4). We would do

well to remember this in our efforts to comprehend and embrace new climates as

they come into being.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the staff of Norwich library for helping access local newspapers

for July 1900. Early versions of this paper were presented at the RGS-IBG Annual

Conference, Manchester August 2009, in the session ‘Cultural Spaces of Climate’ and

in the ‘Environment and Culture’ seminar series at the University of East Anglia in

January 2010. The questions and comments of participants at these occasions are

acknowledged, as are the helpful suggestions of two anonymous reviewers.

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